VISA

NI-VISA Licensing Requirements

In order to use NI-VISA for application development or deployment, you need a valid NI-VISA license. There are several ways you can obtain such a license depending on whether you are developing or deploying an application.

NI-VISA Development Licensing

Most NI software and hardware products include an NI-VISA installer as part of their installation program and as such, include a valid development license for NI-VISA (see table 1 for details).

Examples of products that include NI-VISA are LabVIEW, CVI, TestStand, NI-488.2, GPIB controllers, PXI controllers, etc. If you are not using any NI software or hardware, you can purchase NI-VISA Development Software separately.

3rd Party Hardware includes: other vendors' GPIB, PXI, & VXI bus controllers. This does not include PC buses such as Serial, Ethernet, USB, or IEEE 1394.

NI-VISA Deployment Licensing

If you wish to deploy NI-VISA along with an application using NI-VISA, you can determine whether a deployment license is needed by examining the content of each of your deployed system.

If a deployed system contains:

NI hardware (e.g., GPIB, VXI, PXI, DAQ, etc.); or

NI software ADEs (e.g., LabVIEW FDS, TestStand, etc.); or

An application written using NI software, used for communication through a PC bus, along with the NI software runtime (e.g., LabVIEW .exe accessing PC serial port and LabVIEW runtime engine).

A deployment license for NI-VISA is included

Otherwise, if a deployed system only contains:

3rd party hardware (e.g., Other vendors' GPIB, PXI, & VXI hardware. This does not include PC buses such as Serial, Ethernet, USB, or IEEE 1394).

A separate deployment license fee for NI-VISA is required

This deployment license allows you to redistribute the NI-VISA runtime version only. However, on deployed systems that contain NI ADEs and/or NI hardware, you can choose to deploy the NI-VISA development software instead.